In recent years, media consumption using mobile devices has dramatically increased. Consequently, telecommunication networks are bursting at the seams because of this explosive growth in traffic. This phenomenon is even more evident in the Mobile Broad Band (MBB) networks where the cost of infrastructure is much more (e.g., about 20-30 times) than that of the Fixed Broad Band (FBB) networks. The recent proliferation of mobile devices, such as smart-phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, has kicked off a new era of wireless access to full web on the go. Consequently, the growth of multimedia traffic is expected to be much faster than the growth of traffic in FBB networks in its first 5 years of growth (e.g., from year 2000 to year 2005).
However, MBB and FBB network operators do not benefit from this increased traffic. Most of this fast growing traffic does not contribute to the revenue for the MBB and FBB network operators because this traffic is classified to be direct to consumer traffic, which is often referred to as Over-The-Top (OTT) traffic. Therefore, mitigating the impact of the rapidly growing OTT traffic becomes an urgent priority for the MBB and the FBB network operators.
OTT traffic differs from other traffic such as Business-To-Business (B2B) or Business-To-Consumer (B2C) traffic in that the OTT content and traffic characteristics are unknown to the operators. These unknown characteristics include media origin, media type, delivery protocol/schemes used, protected vs. clear content, dynamic vs. static content, etc. Therefore, handling and mitigating the impact of OTT traffic is difficult because of the technical complexity, network costs, and uncertain nature of the OTT handling.